Glasgow Liveable Neighbourhoods
Tranche 2: Royston to Hogganfield, and Yoker to Whiteinch
Community and stakeholder engagement to help identify opportunities for urban improvements across two large areas of Glasgow, with aims to improve accessibility, connectivity and safety, enhancing access to local town centres, transport nodes and greenery.
New Practice was appointed to undertake the community and stakeholders engagement in two geographically distinct parts of Glasgow, as part of Glasgow Liveable Neighbourhoods, the city’s programme of infrastructural investment projects. The engagement project incorporated sustained communication and updates with local community groups, stakeholders and community councils, providing continued opportunities for input and cross-checking existing development plans and goals throughout the areas. This also helped to foster transparency and trust in the process, and to assist with concerns of consultation fatigue of past or concurrent consultations from other development works.
The Glasgow Liveable Neighbourhoods programme is taking place around the city and seeks to understand how communities use their neighbourhoods. The programme aims at working with and enabling communities to find areas for improvements in their areas through the formation of strategic plans, built around the four Liveable Neighbourhood themes of Local Town Centre, Everyday Journey, Active Travel, Streets for People.
New Practice were appointed by Glasgow City Council at the end of 2022, along with Mott Macdonald and Urban Movement, to design and deliver a complex community and stakeholders engagement programme across two large distinctive areas of Glasgow: the Royston to Hogganfield LN, covering the neighbourhoods of Royston, Sighthill Germiston, Blackhill and Hogganfield, and Yoker to Whiteinch LN, covering the neighbourhoods of Yoker, Scotstoun, Jordanhill and Whiteinch.
The scope of the phased public engagement and consultation programme was to inform a series of ambitious improvement schemes across the two Liveable Neighbourhoods.
The engagement programme was split into three phases, to accompany the design development and provide the most useful information to the design team at each stage of the process:
Phase A: Sense-checking
During this phase, we discussed and sense-checked the initial RIBA Stage 0 findings of the design team with key stakeholders, elected members, and community councils, to help inform the following consultation processPhase B: Insights
A public consultation to gather insights on the project areas, organised into conversations around the four Liveable Neighbourhoods themes. Through in-person and digital activities, we gained a better understanding of local usage, habits, perceived barriers and opportunities for improvements. The information gathered was fedback to the design team, to inform the development of initial design proposalsPhase C: Feedback
During this phase, people had the opportunity to review the emerging project proposals, which have been developed with the outcomes of Phase A and Phase B in mind. Through in-person events and a detailed digital survey, we gathered feedback on the proposed improvements, and provided targeted opportunities for co-design on suitable proposals. The thoughts and comments received from stakeholders and the general public were presented to the design team in the form of key recommendations for each of the proposed improvements.
The consultation phases itself made use of a diverse number of methods and tools, to ensure that multiple opportunities were given for the community to provide their thoughts, at times and locations, and in manners, most suited to them.
These events ranged from traditional outdoor pop-ups in parks and urban spaces, drop-in sessions at key locations, through to creative self-facilitated youth workbooks distributed to charities, community council workshops and ‘neighbourhood walks’ to promote the project and meet the members of the community.
A key success to the consultation was the presence of ‘auxiliary events’, for which New Practice would attend existing community events and activities, to meet people on-the-ground and integrate into their networks and understand existing collective visions.
As part of our engagement programme, we also delivered a series of creative, bespoke youth workshops with schools and youth groups local to the areas, which focussed on finding youth perspectives on active travel, placemaking, greenery, urban accessibility and pedestrian connectivity.
The results and recommendations of our engagement process provided support to the proposals developed by the design team, allowing the client to seek further fundings for the implementation of these improvements.
Client: Glasgow City Council
Location: Glasgow, UK
Completion: 2022-2023
Collaborators: Mott MacDonald, Urban Movement